Archived entries for Technology

Upcoming startup competitions

I’ve been noticing quite a few startup business plan and pitch competitions.  I thought that I should pass along.  Enjoy and let me know if you end up entering any of them.  I’d be curious to hear about your experience.

Best Lady Gaga concert (& tech) experience


Here is my attempt to intertwine my two favorite topics - Lady Gaga and technology.  It’s not a secret that concerts are becoming more and more expensive and company sponsorships are playing a big role before, during, and after the concert.  Earlier this month, San Jose was graced with Ms. Gaga’s presence two nights in a row.  Virgin Mobile is the major sponsor backing Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour.

Outside the seating area near the vendors, multiple booths were set up for fans to take pictures (Polaroid, Virgin Mobile).  Polaroid let fans take pics with a metal orb structure like the one from the “Bad Romance” video.  Very chic.  Fans then have to go to the Polaroid website to buy, yes buy, the picture.  Touche for these companies driving traffic to their websites and the same time fans love posing for pics.

So why is Virgin Mobile a good sponsor?  Well, fans with phones now make the concert an interactive experience.  Who best to connect folks, but a telecommunications company.  Before the concert, fans could text messages and upload pics that show up on the globe-o-tron.  During the concert, all you see is a sea of cameras taking photos or video of Ms. Gaga doing her thing on stage.  If you go to YouTube the night of the concert (search “lady gaga san jose concert 2010″), you can re-live the concert through someone else’s lens.  Technology at its best.

Fans can also win contests during the concert.  For instance, my friend got alerted via text (midst concert) that she won a live phone call from Lady Gaga, a call that Lady Gaga makes in the middle of her show.  When Ms. Gaga called my friend on the phone, you couldn’t miss us because we were plastered on the globe-o-trons chatting away with her.  The contest award also included upgraded seats (lower level row 3) and a backstage meet and greet (after the concert, for a minute).  Let’s just say that I’m a huge Lady Gaga fan and now a Virgin Mobile fan.  Best night ever!

Now, let’s talk about Lady Gaga leveraging social media.  She knows have to use it well.  The top celebrities on Twitter garner over 5 million followers with Ms. Gaga as #1 with 5.8 million followers.  Also, she has the most Facebook fans with 16.5 million fans and had the most watched YouTube video (“Bad Romance” music video) with 267 million views (think Justin Bieber just beat her).  This is not by chance.  Her marketing team knows how to cater to the fans.  Exclusive and controlled content is delivered through these channels and the fans want it.  It’s a win-win situation.  How can you apply the same strategy that makes sense for your business?

PS - If you have been to a Lady Gaga concert, please leave a comment about what you thought.  Share with us!

SF New Tech’s Big (Endless) Summer Social

Last Friday night, I attended an SF New Tech event for the first time.  I don’t normally pay a high ticket price, but I happen to know the owner of the house where the event was taking place.  So to kill two birds with one stone, I took the plunge.  The nice thing about the event was that food and drinks were included. Photos from others can be found here and here and here.

When I first arrived, the event was not ready yet.  Note to self, don’t arrive when the event starts.  I wandered around and attacked the Motorola photo booth (I <3 photo booths!).  They had a bunch of out of space toy props so naturally I picked the mechanical robot arm.  About 30 minutes later, I found out that the same Motorola booth was giving out Droid X phones for free.  All that I had to do was do a 30 second video on what interesting thing that I do outside of work.  I hunted down the one guy who was recording the videos, did my pitch and voila!  Phone!  It was the highlight of my night.  Thank you Motorola (@motomobile)!

Some other booths that were there include Dorsey & Whitney LLP law firm and CalInnovates.org.  The Dorsey booth as far as I could tell was unmanned all evening.  I being a sucker for free schwag raided the booth anyways and got some bottom-lit plastic shot glasses and blinking light keychains.  Not sure what the correlation is with party gear and a law firm, but the schwag were cute trinkets.  The CalInnovates.org gave away free iPhone skins of the California state flag (it’s on my iPhone now) and a free t-shirt, womens if I may add.  They asked how I felt about California legislature affecting high-tech companies.  I just commented that California government is doing what the housing real estate market is doing.  There is a high demand to live in certain areas (e.g, SF, LA, near the beach), so hike up the house price until buyers stop buying aka companies stop coming to California.

The description of the event described it as a mover and shaker type of event with VCs and entrepreneurs and enthusiasts (like me).  It was not apparent to me that there were a lot of VCs at the event.  I did notice a bunch of entrepreneurs which was fun to hear their war stories.  The number of people were on the lower end from what I expected although I did talk to people longer AND met more of the attendees (higher percentage).  Not a total lost cause.

In case you were wondering about the food and drinks.  They had Cass winery, Magners Irish Cider, Kicks ice cream sandwiches, a Mexican taco truck, and an Indian/Mexican food truck.  There were plenty of food and drinks.

Question, would I go again?  If the location is cool, then yes otherwise I’ll pass next time.

Things that I learned

  • when working with potential cofounders: 1)  before starting, agree to high level plans of the role that person could play and what contribution translate to what equity %, 2) work on small projects and see if working relationship and quality of work are good before moving forward
  • you don’t need to be techie to work on a tech idea, in a previous posting, I mentioned the same thing.  as a non-techie, you can do mockups (check out MockApps) to show to your potential cofounder or contractors
  • money can come from your extended network.  i met a founder who got some odd millions of dollars (think $5M) from a shared connection with his company’s lawyer
  • demo like a salesperson.  one demo booth was uninteresting.  they had 4 youngsters hanging out and when i walked up, asked if i wanted to see a demo instead of just pitching and demoing.  amateurs! j/k :)
  • don’t eat anything messy because you’ll get dirty and people will talk about “that guy” or “that girl” who spilled all over the place.  there was one guy, so I heard, that ate some mexican food and spilled it all over the front of his shirt.

People whom I met:

  • Director at Silicon Valley Bank
  • Founder of Appfeeds
  • Founder of a medical management software system
  • Director at Woodside Capital
  • Founder of a digital media company
  • A lawyer focused on startups
  • Founder of SF MusicTech
  • Marketing person at a stealth B2C/B2B payment company
  • Founder of Chic Meets Geek events

Willow Garage launches PR2 Robot Beta Program

I remember back in 2007/2008 time frame when I visited Willow Garage for the first time.  The CEO explained the company’s vision about changing the world with robots and an open-source robotics operating system (ROS).  They didn’t have one working robot at the time, nada.  Now flash forward to today, they just launched the PR2 robot beta program, giving away 11 robots to (mostly) universities and (some) companies.  Beta participants must commit to contributing to ROS over a span of two years.  The cost of the robots is over $4.4M.  Note to self, changing the world is not cheap.  Most of the proposed projects are focused on getting robots to perform general day-to-day activities such as opening/closing drawers, maneuvering a crowded place, carrying objects, and so forth.

The potential of ROS is promising.  It could do what computer operating systems help do for computer applications.  Computer operating systems eliminate (mostly) the need to write low-level code (e.g., based on a common platform) and help people focus on creating value-add applications.  When Windows came out, a whole slew of applications came out of the woodwork.  Imagine if all the robotics folks used a common platform like ROS.  Maybe we would see more innovation coming from the robotics space.  I don’t know, something to think about.

If you haven’t already, check out a PR2 folding a towel.

[Updated 5/17/2010] Also, check out Google Founder Sergey Brin using Texai.

APWT Womens Panel on Mobile Paradigm

Over at HackerDojo, I attended a womens panel on “Mobile Paradigm” organized by Asian Professional Women in Technology.  There were about 50-60 people in attendance, of which I knew about 4-5 people.  PayPal provided pizza and drinks for the event, Thanks PayPayl!  The panel consisted of a CEO of a travel guide app for the iPad, a bootstrap developer of many iPhone apps and an iPad app, and a marketing person from a Shazam-competitor app.  Ishita Majumdar, Executive In Residence at Plug-N-Play, moderated the panel.  I really enjoyed the networking time after the panel (I missed the pre-panel networking time).   I met some cool, interesting gals (and guys).

Panelists and my take aways:

  • Georgi Dagnall, CEO, GeoGad
    • chose a clever name that is related to your app idea
  • Bess Ho, ninja mobile developer with 10 apps in the app stores and speaker at Web 2.0
    • get inspiration from shopping, movies, and tv
    • read your competitor app reviews
    • if you don’t know how to program, just start drawing out the screens (aka wireframe)
  • Kathleen McMahon, VP of Sales, SoundHound, Inc.
    • innovate, distribute, monetize

I was a bit too tired to ask my questions, but I was interested in knowing what strategies they use to get users?  What worked for them?  What didn’t work for them?  Did they think about the business model at the beginning?  Maybe they will read my blog and tell me by commenting.  Hahaha.

Personal observations of people starting up

I had a realization about startup ideas.  A good idea is one that you can’t wait to build and share with others.  During my hay day of being an MBA student, I cranked out a bunch of business plans and entered in some competitions.  I guess that I was searching for fame and fortune.  Instead, I spent spending a lot of time thinking about theoretical ideas that never came to fruition.  In general, I wanted experience in vetting out business ideas, presenting ideas, and getting feedback from investors and peers.  I would say that I have a better idea of what will and will not work now.  In addition to my ongoing learning experience, I try to attend to as many tech/women events as I can.  I want to know who’s who, who’s doing what, and what I can learn.  The best place to do networking is in the Silicon Valley area.  We have the best, brightest people around.  Yep, the best hands down.

Here are my observations of people trying to start up:

  • Finding co-founders is harder than you think, there’s a reason why there are events just for finding co-founders.
  • You don’t have to work at a startup to mingle with the startup elite.  Everyone’s a geek, just speak geek and look chic.  Ta-dah!
  • Networking events happen every day of the week and are mostly in the Palo Alto/Mountain View area and San Francisco, sorry San Jose folks, you have to make the trek up north, but it’s worth it!
  • Don’t spin your wheels on finding the perfect solution, just build the minimum viable product.  If you can spark interest with your one-line pitch, you may have something good.  If you can get paid customers before your build the product, you definitely have something good.
  • If you are unsure about a startup idea, write a brief business plan to help identify gaps in skills/relationships.  It’s a good exercise if you are clueless on how to start.
  • A good startup idea makes for a good business plan, not the other way around.  If you have a bad startup idea, it doesn’t matter how good your business plan is on paper, it’s still a bad startup idea.
  • First to market is not an advantage, it just means that you are the first to make all the mistakes so that others after you don’t have to make them.

Good luck with your (ad)venture!

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